Rady Children’s to open new heart unit

In preparation for its first heart transplant, Rady Children’s Hospital will soon open its new Cardiovascular Intensive Care, officials said Wednesday.

Benjamin Metcalf, a spokesman for Rady, said that the hospital remodeled an existing unit of its main San Diego facility near Sharp Memorial Hospital to create the heart unit, which is set to accept its first patient on Sunday. He said the move consolidates cardiac services that were previously spread throughout the hospital.

“In the past, cardiac patients were kind of scattered throughout the hospital. Now they’re all in one place, and they have critical care nurses who are trained specifically for that specialty,” Metcalf said.

Rady has been working for several years to build the infrastructure necessary to offer heart transplants, a service that currently requires patients to leave the area.

“Right now, if a child needs a heart transplant, we have to send them to Los Angeles,” Metcalf said.

While heart transplants are still on the to-do list, Rady performs the full spectrum of heart-related procedures on the young patients its cares for. The hospital, Metcalf said, performed nearly 500 heart-related procedures in 2012, with correction of congenital heart defects at the top of the list.

While the remodeling cost was low, Metcalf said it will cost Rady about $2.5 million per year to operate the new unit. He said there is no firm date for the hospital to perform its first pediatric heart transplant, though that milestone is expected “in the near future.”

In addition to new paint and furnishings, the unit also includes a full range of cardiac intensive-care equipment, including an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) system that can be used to keep oxygenated blood flowing through a patient’s body when the heart’s normal function is impaired.